Mobile Video Fails to Please

A recent mobile phone subscriber survey conducted by In-Stat US shows that one in eight subscribers showed interest in buying mobile video services from their wireless carrier. The interest may indeed be there, but the survey called Mobile Video Services – Perched at the Brink, also shows that two-thirds of the survey respondents are not yet ready for video services on their mobile devices. This sentiment is more or less the same from the previous year’s survey.

Still, In-Stat believes that subscriber interest is enough to produce significant revenue and predicts that the number of subscribers buying mobile video content in the USA will rise from about 1.1 million in 2005 to over 30 million in 2010. That’s a pretty optimistic outlook considering their recent findings, maybe mobile video will be so flooded in the future that carriers will be giving the stuff away.

Following are the other things that In-Stat found out from its survey.

• The best clients for mobile video (i.e., loyal subscribers who are not likely to switch carriers) are the ones least interested in buying mobile video.

• Between 2005 and 2010, the greatest year-on-year growth will occur from 2005 to 2006 due to the widespread deployment of high-bandwidth networks in the US. Spurring this growth further is further carrier marketing of video services and wider availability of video-capable mobile phones.